Most futures contracts involve delivery of a commodity such as gold, wheat or lumber. For years you could also buy contracts on financial products such as Treasury bonds and euros. Therefore, SSFs are alternatives to options and, if you believe an equity’s price will go down soon, short selling. You can buy a contract (usually 100 shares of stock and 1000 shares for many ETFs) by putting down only 20% margin. You can sell it any time prior to the expiration date (usually the third Friday of the expiration month). If the stock’s market price has gone up, you’ll make money. If it’s gone down, you’ll lose. If you hold the stock through expiration date, you accept delivery of the shares at the contract price. While you own the contract, you do not have any shareholder rights and do not receive dividends. It’s just as easy to sell contracts if you think…

Savvy traders are making the easy investment choice of using binary options to day trade stocks. Three of the most appealing features are the non-existent fees and commissions, the high rates of return, and the hourly or end of day expiration. What could be better? Someone must have been listening to the needs of day traders when binary options were designed. The way these trades are set up are an investor will go to a trading platform where these securities are being offered. Given the relatively small size of the present market only a select few options are offered – and then only on the most recognizable, most highly liquid stocks (think Google, Microsoft, VW, BMW, GE), indices (Nasdaq) and forex cross rates (GBP/USD, USD/YEN, etc). Investing in well known items like these is another factor making binary options an easy investment to understand. These days even some…

Corporate bond returns in the U.S. are lagging behind Europe by the most in a year, a trend that Wall Street�€™s biggest banks say is poised to reverse as the economies of the two continents diverge. This week, Northern Pegasus have joined a number of analyst teams in recommending clients favor company debt in the U.S. after investment-grade securities lost 0.97 percent this month, compared with the 0.11 percent gain in Europe, as measured by Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes. The gap in performance is the most since last February, when the difference was 1.21 percentage points. Strategists are turning bullish on U.S. credit markets as economists estimate growth will be more than double that of Europe, making it easier for borrowers to meet debt payments. Dollar-denominated bonds sold by New York-based Pfizer Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG, Germany�€™s largest phone company…

Advisers have a real opportunity to serve the needs of clients who are saving for retirement — especially women. A new survey of defined-contribution-plan participants conducted by Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. revealed that women are more likely than men to seek professional retirement-planning help as a result of the recession. Roughly 12% of the surveyed women said they already use the services of an adviser, compared with about 10% of the men in the poll. “It is incumbent upon providers and financial advisers in the retirement space to provide the information necessary to help both men and women make good decisions,” Elaine Sarsynski, executive vice president of MassMutual’s retirement division, and chairman and chief executive of MassMutual International LLC, said in the press release. Being able to retire is the biggest concern of the respondents (followed by health care costs, job security…